First Look: Twinkle

I'll admit it, until recently, I was a Twitter holdout. When I say recently, I mean last week. Between six email accounts, four IM accounts, a personal blog, text messages and finally, phone calls, I felt pretty connected to my friends and family. Adding Twitter to the mix just seemed excessive. No one needs to know that much about me.

Easy setup and tweet composition

All that changed with Twinkle. The iPhone app creates an "elite of the elite" network with its location feature, on-demand photo sharing and Near Me feature. The Twitter web app for the iPhone allows users to post text, and that's about it. Twinkle surpasses that and creates an environment where users are interacting with other Twinkle users within a set radius of their location. From within one mile to 252,000 miles, users see what other Twinkle users are posting. Combine that with Twinkle's ability to share photos taken with the iPhone and you've expanded online networking to the streets.

While San Francisco is a great Twinkle town, small town users may feel left out

Need to find where the best clubs are? Ask Twinkle users. Want to know if it's rainy or sunny on the other side of town? Ask Twinkle users. I can see Twinkle users sharing images and text about local news as it happens and gathering at events. It's a mobile army of tweets.

While Twinkle is perfect for a tech-savvy city like San Francisco, small town users may find themselves expanding their Near Me range to include the nearest city. In fact, the largest drawback is Twinkle's available user base. Twinkle only runs on jailbroken iPhones for the time being. Users must have a Twitter account, an iPhone, it must be jailbroken, and finally they need to have installed the software. That's a small demographic.

It's not without its new-app growing pains. There are the occasional freeze up bugs. Although, with a hacked iPhone you can never be sure if it's the app or the phone. Also, Twinkle doesn't save any of the photos you take to tweet and doesn't allow photos stored on your device to be used in tweets. I don't expect this issue to be rectified, considering Apple's insistence that third-party apps keep their grubby little hands off media on the iPhone.

On the whole, it's a great app for the Twitter user with a jailbroken iPhone. Fortunately, according to its developer, Twinkle is heading for the App Store as soon as it's ported. Until then, current Twinkle users can rest assured they are a very select group.